our dated dream house

Each and every morning, our little dog Picasso wakes us up by climbing on our faces and demanding to go outside and then fed his breakfast. He doesn’t care if I had a work trip the day before and am really tired, or how many glasses of wine I had the night before, or that it’s a damn Saturday.

“I’m going to jump on your face until you let me out so I can pee on your ferns and flowers, then I want to eat, and after that I will be tired and want to go back to bed”

Today was no different except Mike noticed our cat Chloe wasn’t hanging around as she usually is as we shuffle through this early morning routine. We combed the house, looked under every bed and in every corner…..nothing. The weather was pretty nice last night so maybe we left the door open when we let the dogs out for the last time and she somehow slipped out and out of sight before we noticed? Unlikely since she will venture out from time to time, but stays within about 6″ of the door and runs back in as soon as we notice her. We had exhausted all our interior options though, so at about 4:45 AM, we ventured out with flashlight in search of that glowing pair of yellow eyes. A bit later I located a mound of black fur wedged under our side porch’s stairs. Yay! We found her. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get to her so I had to kick in the lattice under the porch which scared her and she ran under the back deck. I crawled in there, on my hands and knees, through god-knows-what, and that little shit somehow fit herself under the deck which is sitting on the ground. I had to army crawl under those stairs where I could see her, but couldn’t really reach her. This is also when I noticed she had disturbed an ant hill and there were little pissy red ants all over the place. We tried begging, I tried pulling her towards me with a stick, we considered just leaving her there and hoping she would come out on her own, but ended up deciding we were not going back inside without her. With my cheek on the dirt, I managed to get my arm into the small space and grab her tail, but that really pissed her off and she hissed and cried and got deeper into the space under the deck.

At this point I was so exasperated, I didn’t really care what happened to her, but I don’t need a dead cat under the deck so we did this:

Because everyone dreams of starting their weekend with dismantling their deck so they can drag an angry cat out, covered in ants and leaves.

The best part, and most comical now that this ordeal is over, is we had the dogs out with us because they wouldn’t stop barking, and our resident possum, Cropsey, who splits his time between our yard and the neighbors, moseyed on over to see what all the action was about. Mike thought it was Picasso at first until an insane commotion of barking and chasing ensued. That thing was so shocked he couldn’t just walk in and check out what we were doing. So at 5 am this morning, I was in our back yard, covered in dirt and leaves, and screaming at a possum who couldn’t even be bother to move at a pace faster than a relaxed walk to get out our yard.